In her English debut, Venezuelan fiction writer and poet Dayana Fraile conjures an urban scenario where the self unapologetically embraces a melancholic gait. These are city poems built on a fractured diction, with lines constructed out of tin roofs, skyscrapers, knuckles and traffic. The city might be Caracas, Venezuela but it’s also a stage where the poet maps out her particular narrative of doubt, frustration and visionary fervor. The poems in Zinc Landscape employ the daily panorama as an opportunity for reinterpreting our inner world, where crickets “essay silence” and “the shadow makes body.” Thinking of Baudelaire’s relationship to Paris, Walter Benjamin wrote: “We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.” These poems let us witness this interpenetration as it proceeds from tree branches to office cubicles, plazas, avenues and TV screens. Dayana Fraile’s hard poems are furnished with “the aluminum of the season.” --Guillermo Parra

Cy Gist Press is a micropress with a loose focus on ekphrastic poetry. The press was founded by editor Mark Lamoureux in 2005. All chapbooks are produced in-house by hand.

Until the present, chapbooks have been produced in editions of 100. As of 2010, Cy Gist press will be shifting to publishing a greater number of chapbooks in smaller editions of 50. This is in response to the amount of sales that are typical for a chapbook, and to the challenges of our present economy.

Cy Gist Press is not currently accepting unsolicited submissions, and is not likely to do so in the near future. If you feel your work urgently belongs on Cy Gist Press, please speak to the editor in person.